World

There are any number of directions we could have taken in this final unit of the course--comparing literature by writers of African descent from outside the borders of the United States with African American literature, examining writings by African Americans who were active in pan-Africanist or third worldist movements, considering the reception of African American literature and cultural productions outside the United States, or discussing the impact of Africa and the slave trade on patterns in world history and political economy. We could have focused on the figure of W.E.B. Du Bois, whose novel Dark Princess and autobiography Dusk of Dawn situate African American history in a world context, or on Paule Marshall's novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People which links the history of the slave trade and of slavery with the politics of development and neo-colonialism in the 1960s Caribbean, or on Maryse Conde's novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem which connects North and South American histories, or on Martin Delany's 1867 novel Blake; or the Huts of America.

Instead, we're going to focus on how a few selected twentieth-century poets and essayists represent global issues and on the ways in which Gayl Jones's 1975 novel Corregidora theorizes the traumatic impact of Brazilian slavery on four generations of African American women. Jones's Corregidora also gives us an opportunity to revisit issues from the country, nation units of the course, from the function of the blues to the migration from country to city, from the competing appeals of various nationalisms to the politics of gender and sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s.

Suggestions for further exploration:

• Highly Recommended Movies: A Dry White Season, Deep Cover (Bill Duke, 1992, 107 min.)....
  
• There are a couple of recent anthologies on reserve that focus on black writers from outside the U.S.: William L. Andrews, eds., Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave Narratives, 1772-1815, and Charles Rowell, ed., Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe.
• For contexts for Corregidora and the neo-slave narrative, see Gayl Jones's Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature, Angela Y. Davis's Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Brian Ward's Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations, Robin Blackburn's The Making of New World Slavery, and Tejumola Olaniyan's Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance (all on reserve). For criticism on Corregidora and the neo-slave narrative more generally, see Barbara Christian's Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, Stelamaris Coser's Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones, Madhu Dubey's Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic, my own essay in Judith Jackson Fossett and Jeffrey Tucker, eds., Race Consciousness: African American Studies for the New Century, Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu's Black Women Writers and the Neo-Slave Narrative, Ashraf H.A. Rushdy's Neo-Slave Narratives, and Venetria Patton's Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women's Fiction (all on reserve), as well as Slavery and the Literary Imagination, edited by Deborah McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (not on reserve).